Doing the Charleston

by Theodore Dalrymple (May 2015)

In stately old Charleston,’ ran a headline in a recent edition of the New York Times, ‘New Buildings on the Block Are Struggling to Fit In.’ This is a very strange way of putting it: for it reverses the relation between Man and his own productions.

Buildings cannot struggle, not even metaphorically: they are not like fish in the talons of an eagle or a wart hog attacked by a lion. Admittedly one does not look to the Times for elegance of writing, perhaps not even for mere accuracy, though its layout looks as if it was designed by a professor of Aramaic philology at the University of Gottingen in about 1880. Pedantic layout, loose (though dull) writing: that more or less summarizes the Timesmore>>>

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One Response

  1. I too grieve for Charleston. My family settled in Charleston in the 1600’s and my ancestors built a handsome house said to be “the finest example of Georgian architecture in America.” It still remains in the family and has been restored to it’s 1700’s glory. Unfortunately, the last 25 to 30 years has changed the city of Charleston from a charming and relatively unknown jewel from the past inhabited by old Southern families that after “The War” found themselves “too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash” their ancestral homes whose pre Revolutionary War splendor was unmatched in the colonies, to an overcrowded, Yankee infested, over restored and overdone guilded lily where one would be hard pressed to scare up a true Charlestonian. I, for one moved to Wyoming 20 plus years ago to escape the infiltration!

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